Literature
The underbelly of Krochmalna Street
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Why aren’t Isaac Bashevis Singer’s gangster novels published in English?
Let’s enjoy the moon
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Eight young women live in a college run by nuns in Rome; an excerpt from Alba de Céspedes’ There’s No Turning Back (Nessuno Torna Indietro).
No longer at home
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A review of Hangman: A Novel by Maya Binyam. «Returning home rests as the thematic cornerstone of African and African-diasporic literature.»
The body in the crushed roses
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Excerpt from Sergei Lebedev’s new novel The Lady of the Mine (2025), set near a Ukrainian coal mine that buries atrocities from the past.
Something rotten
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On the sanatoriums of Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
The business of men
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On pregnancy’s bloody histories & its visceral fictions. A review of Trudy Dehue’s brilliant history of pregnancy research, « Egg, Fetus, Baby ».
Neanderthal aesthetics
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Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, reviewed. «If we discovered a Neanderthal novel, would we be worthy of it?»
The Barren Nothing-Place
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On growing up in the creases of bilingual versions of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Needle & pen
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Jane Austen valued fashion as an intrinsic part of one’s character — whether in her own life or in a novel.
The Mothers Grimm
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What ties Gretel to her witch? Louise Glück’s poem Gretel in Darkness provides answers.
The size of longing
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On Jacob Israël de Haan’s Palestine and Arnold Zweig’s novel of post‑Zionist disillusionment